Emergency vehicles, such as police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks, must swiftly make their ways to respond to what may often be life-threatening emergencies. In order to promote the swift and safe passage of such emergency vehicles, visual and audio alarms including horns, sirens, and lights are utilized to clear the path of the emergency vehicles. Systems have also been developed to preempt traffic signals as the emergency vehicles approach a street intersection controlled by such traffic signals, to give the emergency vehicles the right of way while alerting and stopping other vehicles and pedestrians.
Despite various mechanisms to aid the swift and safe travel of emergency vehicles, these vehicles are often hindered by motorists who ignore the sirens, flashing lights, and/or preempted signals, and fail to yield their way to the emergency vehicles. Such motorists may not only violate traffic laws requiring that they yield to emergency vehicles responding to emergency calls, but may also impede a quick response to the emergency calls and put at risk the lives of the emergency responders.
Nonetheless, offending motorists are rarely if at all penalized for their behavior. Even if the emergency responder who is hindered by an offending motorist is a police officer, the police officer rarely has the opportunity to divert from an emergency call to handle the offense. Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method for detecting and penalizing motorists who fail to yield to emergency vehicles.